Question:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/ken...722744304.html

Answer:
she looks fat, flabby and ready to keel over and die after the fake smile relaxes. Wasn't this guy the White House has announced was responsible for 9/11 and 24 other terrorist attacks also implicated in the death of Marilyn?

Answer:
She's not interesting to me.
People die.
People are born.
Life goes on.

Answer:
Originally Posted by CoTHukoB She's not interesting to me.
People die.
People are born.
Life goes on. Evidently you don't reside in the US. Because the subjects of that article are American Royalty.

Answer:
Originally Posted by fredricktoo she looks fat She was never skinny, but I would never say she was fat. I think that everyone has way too high standards for women.
people die,
people are born. Very freakin' true, thanks for saying that.
- Rich

Answer:
Originally Posted by fredricktoo Evidently you don't reside in the US. Because the subjects of that article are American Royalty. i reside in the US all right. i pay may taxes. i consume goods and services. i carry a US passport. i vote. Okay, i'll give you the importance of both Marilyn's jugs and Kennedy's bollocks.
It's just that the subject somehow doesn't interest me. Nothing personal. Just keeping the thread alive by bumping it because i'm curious what others have to say.

Answer:
nobody says jugs and bollocks in this country... ever
this sounds like a damn cheap british comedy
--------------------------------------
Originally Posted by _R$_ She was never skinny, but I would never say she was fat. I think that everyone has way too high standards for women.
Very freakin' true, thanks for saying that.
- Rich I'll second that. As soul survivor in my family I buried all but one. my brother when he was only fourteen. but we're straying into forbidden territory on this forum so lets say we all lighten up

Answer:
Originally Posted by fredricktoo nobody says jugs and bollocks in this country... ever. This sounds like a damn cheap british comedy Okay. She had a nice 'rack' and Kennedy had a pair. He made a call. Khruschev made a call. And here we are in 2007. How's that? Where do we go from here?

Answer:
I find evidence of members of the government murdering citizens with impunity interesting.
I was forwarded an article today about mercenaries in Iraq who have been unaccountable and unaccounted for while there are an equal number of them on the ground there and US soldiers: 100,000. Guess it's one of those "shocking but not surprising" stories, but still, pretty eye opening. This is merely about corporations giving up citizens to slaughter and low lifes murdering iraqis with impunity, but I also find it interesting.
And before anyone thinks of deleteing this, I'm not discussing politics or religion, I'm posting a new item!
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill_vid
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bush's Shadow Army
by JEREMY SCAHILL
[posted online on March 15, 2007]
Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration's growing dependence on
private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to
rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The
Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).
* * *
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or
imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to
the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as
Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former
corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the
high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like
Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a
declaration of war.
"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to
the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It
disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and
women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm
describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the
adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."
Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon,
supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the
private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience,
"I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to
save it from itself."
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing
757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld
would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But
it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity
presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on
the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions,
sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors.
It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more
entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not
reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture
capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign
Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an
attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here
to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him
with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force
posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small
footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in
modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of
war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their
unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US
troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made
private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the
government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton
was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in
March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors
ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006,
there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in
Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he
took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an
official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial
Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD,
which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the
"Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components,
its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting
capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of
locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish
critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for
war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before
enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover,
allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of
public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces
shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in
turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal
constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors
on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations.
"We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted,
and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis
Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a
golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month
into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing
investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair
of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning
from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive
hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't
have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days
later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of
staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb
asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks,
particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by
active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey
defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones
that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the
Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on
contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills
gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary
company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the
Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power
and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success
represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials
who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical
privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has
repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the
"Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's
"warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the
company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the
immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound
by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into
Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts
under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company
reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that
has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire
and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose
generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and
the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely
consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land
located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision
was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of
firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his
family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign
coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of
George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was
friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the
company's glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11,
the company would become a central player in a global war. "I've been
operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to
get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox
News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the
hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work
in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing
years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war
on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts,
many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the
Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private
military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine
countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of
more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private
intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and
target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it
billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in
more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors
deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively
pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division.
Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of
Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all
US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside
US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for
providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract
began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq
proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US
ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other
diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety
Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004
Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts
alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent
into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush
lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a
potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC,
representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected
Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the
Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black,
former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for
Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector
General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during
much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing
effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator
Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had
"quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush
Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed
up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows
until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were
ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged
them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates.
In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to
Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands,
inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this
day. For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private
soldiers. "People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon," says
Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat, who said he began
monitoring the use of private contractors after Falluja. "I'm probably like
most Congress members in kind of coming to this awareness and developing an
interest in it" after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater
executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company's newfound
recognition. The day after the ambush, it hired the Alexander Strategy
Group, a K Street lobbying firm run by former senior staffers of
then-majority leader Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the
Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was
sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, including its chair, John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged
the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican
senators--Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and George
Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces
Prince had had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military
contracts. Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence
Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed
Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House
Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings remains a
secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of
its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the
government's most valuable international security contracts, worth more than
$300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting the rules that would
govern mercenaries under US contract. "Because of the public events of March
31, [Blackwater's] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message
has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new lobbyist Chris
Bertelli. "There are now several federal regulations that apply to their
activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking
is an industry standard. That's something we definitely want to be engaged
in." By May Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by the private military
industry to try to block Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their
forces under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the "war on terror"
within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of
the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater
as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones
were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight
answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful
death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of
not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed
safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja
mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should
have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could
have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the
war-contractor industry--former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an
amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could
pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors
find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war
zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system, Blackwater has
enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it, among them Fred
Fielding, who was recently named by Bush as White House counsel, replacing
Harriet Miers; and Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating
President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record. Blackwater
has not formally debated the specific allegations in the suit, but what has
emerged in its court filings is a series of legal arguments intended to
bolster Blackwater's contention that it is essentially above the law.
Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to be sued for
wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's war-fighting capacity:
"Nothing could be more destructive of the all-volunteer, Total Force concept
underlying U.S. military manpower doctrine than to expose the private
components to the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported
overseas to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers. In
February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court declined
its appeal to hear the Falluja case, paving the way for the state
trial--where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award--to
proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially groundbreaking
case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman chaired hearings of the
Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the hearings were billed as
looking at US reliance on military contractors, they largely focused on
Blackwater and the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was
forced to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja.
"Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the
military's chain of command and can literally do whatever they please
without any liability or accountability from the US government," Katy
Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed,
told the committee. "Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds
of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having
to answer a single question about its security operators."
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel, Andrew Howell,
declined to respond to many of the charges levied against his company by the
families and asked several times for the committee to go into closed
session. "The men who went on the mission on March 31, each had their
weapons and they had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee,
adding that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply
disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save $1.5
million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles. "Once the
men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater
treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston told lawmakers in her
emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the labyrinth of
subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission. Since November 2004 Waxman
has been trying to pin down who the Blackwater men were ultimately working
for the day of the ambush. "For over eighteen months, the Defense Department
wouldn't even respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied
last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested. In fact, it
denied that private security contractors did any work at all under the
[Pentagon's contracting program]. We now know that isn't true." Waxman's
struggle to follow the money on this one contract involving powerful war
contractors like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature
of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is that Blackwater was
working with a Kuwaiti business called Regency under a contract with the
world's largest food services company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a
subcontractor for KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under
the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering
Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was ultimately a
subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this. Then ESS wrote Waxman to
say the mission was conducted under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied
that, and the Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the mission
was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other
subcontractors were "adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for
the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US
taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors
is so murky that we can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone
calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the
subcontracting process," says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing that the contract's
provenance would remain obscure, that changed when, at the end of the
hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the original contractor was, in fact,
KBR. In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors' using
private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a
subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were
allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater
said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more
than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks
after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to
$400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple
question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services? But, as the Falluja
lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue. It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja,
another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve
inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater
contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior
Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated
around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi
was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was
spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got
nowhere--the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater
contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the
session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the
room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the
incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater
had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. "That
gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty," Howell said,
in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater.
"Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."
"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?"
Kucinich asked.
"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there's currently an
investigation," Howell replied. "We are fully cooperating and supporting
that investigation."
Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's a question that
could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in
helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a
murder."
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress aimed at oversight
and transparency of the private forces that have emerged as major players in
the wars of the post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan,
Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed at cracking down
on no-bid contracts and cronyism, providing for penalties of up to twenty
years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for what they called "war
profiteering." It is part of what Democrats describe as a multi-pronged
approach. "I think there's a critical mass of us now who are working on it,"
says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state. In January
Price introduced legislation that would expand the Military Extraterritorial
Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) to include all contractors in a war zone,
not just those working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of
Blackwater's work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State
Department. Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting could be
a test case of sorts under his legislation. "I will be following this and
I'll be calling for a full investigation," he said.
But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach: Price's office
consulted with the private military lobby as it crafted the legislation,
which has the industry's strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has
been for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when US civilian law
could potentially have been applied to contractor crimes, it wasn't,"
observed P.W. Singer, a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors
are already strapped for resources in their home districts--how could they
be expected to conduct complex investigations in Iraq? Who will protect the
investigators and prosecutors? How will they interview Iraqi victims? How
could they effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a dangerous
war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price. "I'm not saying that it
would be a simple matter." He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put
the whole contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."
This past fall, taking a different tack--much to the dismay of the
industry--Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer and
former reserve judge, quietly inserted language into the 2007 Defense
Authorization, which Bush signed into law, that places contractors under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), commonly known as the court martial
system. Graham implemented the change with no public debate and with almost
no awareness among the broader Congress, but war contractors immediately
questioned its constitutionality. Indeed, this could be a rare moment when
mercenaries and civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors
are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and other support
services. While the argument could be made that armed contractors like those
working for Blackwater should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change
could result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being prosecuted
like a US soldier. On top of all this, the military has enough trouble
policing its own massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor an
additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides, many contractors in Iraq are
there under the auspices of the State Department and other civilian
agencies, not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced
comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of
engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to
"arrest and detain" contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over
to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice
Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of
contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and
criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors
are "operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and
virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability
increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as
contractors." He said his legislation would "re-establish control over these
companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence
committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq
and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which
bolsters Obama's, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue
fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among
other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public
the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed
in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's, international or US laws that
have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against
contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors.
Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get
this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. "We're talking about
billions and billions of dollars--some have estimated forty cents of every
dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn't
get any information on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been
virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so
when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been
part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that's been operating in
Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm's length from
the American people what this war is all about."
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor
casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December
31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those
contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government's
Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely
much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq.
And then there's the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds
have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet
even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet
the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had
been stretched so thin by the "war on terror" that former Secretary of State
Colin Powell declared "the active Army is about broken." Rather than
rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans
for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the
military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union
address. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It
would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians
with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them,"
Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to
something the Administration has already done with its "revolution" in
military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush's
proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public,
the Administration's increasing reliance on private military contractors has
gone largely undebated and underreported.
"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say
'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight--it just takes money
and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which has sued contractors for alleged abuses in
Iraq. "To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is
resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement,
foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist
wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on
retaining its declining empire."
With talk of a Civilian Reserve Corps and Blackwater promoting the idea of a
privatized "contractor brigade" to work with the military, war critics in
Congress are homing in on what they see as a sustained, undeclared
escalation through the use of private forces. "'Surge' implies a bump that
has a beginning and an end," says Schakowsky. "Having a third or a quarter
of [the forces] present on the ground not even part of the debate is a very
dangerous thing in our democracy, because war is the most critical thing
that we do."
Indeed, contractor deaths are not counted in the total US death count, and
their crimes and violations go undocumented and unpunished, further masking
the true costs of the war. "When you're bringing in contractors whom the law
doesn't apply to, the Geneva Conventions, common notions of morality,
everything's thrown out the window," says Kucinich. "And what it means is
that these private contractors are really an arm of the Administration and
its policies."
Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private
forces in so-called "black bag," "false flag" or covert operations in Iraq.
"What's the difference between covert activities and so-called overt
activities which you have no information about? There's no difference," he
says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply
limited to oversight and transparency. "It's the privatization of war," he
says. The Administration is "linking private war contractor profits with
warmaking. So we're giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the
Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits,
and those opportunities are more war. And that's why the role of private
contractors should be sharply limited by Congress."

Answer:
as they say: it's just business. Corporations have more rights than citizens since we got Alfred E Neumann in OUR White House.
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thanks for the article Marky. Interesting that the word mercenary is only used once.
I'm adding 'The Nation' and 'Soldier of Fortune' to my subscriptions. One of these days they're gonna find me dead under the stacks of books. newspapers and magazines.